[doveman2]

the screen should still dim

Ah, yeah that'll be OK then

[doveman2]

doveman2,
you can access the openelec settings via the program addons, no need to switch around the skins. The visualisations - except for the default one - do not work here either, but that's not skin dependent, it's rather an image or xbmc issue

Thanks for the tip, although I do tend to hide Program from Home as I don't have anything else under there so it seems a waste of space. Visualisations do work for me when using Confluence and I haven't changed it so it should be using the default one.

I find that when I add a category to Home (Videos, Addons) then they get out of sync, so that when I'm on Pictures it shows the list for Addons, when I'm on Videos it shows the list for Movie. Maybe this only happens when there's more categories on screen than fit, so that it has to scroll. Anyway, switching to another skin and back seems to sort it out and I haven't seen it happen apart from right after adding categories so it shouldn't be a major problem.

I find if I go to Music Addons and then back to Home and then to Music, it goes back to Music Addons instead of the files (basically Music goes to the previously selected folder and Addons is treated as a folder). This happens with Confluence as well though, when selecting the main Music category or Files underneath, so seems to be a general XBMC bug but obviously it's not ideal.

I'd quite like to see some Favourite shortcuts to addons in a list under each category, so that for example iPlayer, Youtube, etc could be accessed directly from Home rather than having to go into Video Addons first (as with Confluence but using a text list rather than icons). This would probably be a sort of workaround for the above problem as well until such time as it's fixed in XBMC (if ever), as if we can avoid going into Addons then (I think) Video/Music will always go to the last actual folder and never to addons.

[wyrm]

Whoa guys,

Away in the real world for the weekend and the place goes to hell Lets see if I can answer some of what has happen here in the last 24 hours.

@bench

Yes, LiveTV stuff does to the most part seem to work different to other views as it is different as far as XBMC is concerned. As I have said before I (and a lot of other skinners) are using the demo PVR client for coding. We are also tending to copy the coding of these screens from other skins that already have these screens coded and so possible a lot of these screens don't match the original skins code that well. As we come to terms with this stuff it will no doubt improve. As to coding for you stuff for LiveTV, not really, it's just you are the first to give me some indication of what is working and not working.

@doveman2 and bench,

will take a look at the code for background video and visualisations and see what is wrong. For anyone that has been using this skin since the early days will be able to tell you, the background image handling has been an area that has been worked on constantly. I think I have finally managed to get the speed of this code to the point where there is not a whole lot of difference between plain background and fancy fanart backgrounds. I guess there are still a bug or two lurking here, so by all means let me know if you see any strangeness here.

@stuCONNERS,

I am really loath to remove this animation from the skin as it is such a basic part of the user interface. It is basically the only way you know if something is happening. You just need to look at installing addons from the "install from zip" option to see what I mean here (what is happening, is it installing? Has it finished? Was it successful? The UI provides NO feedback to the user at this point and that is BAD UI design). That said, the performance hit for displaying this feedback is probably really too high, so I will try to come up with an acceptable compromise on this if I can. Really this is an issue that needs to be addressed at the XBMC level, not the skin level.

@doveman2

I'm thinking about adding Custom Addon Favourites as well, but in that case you would still need to show the Addons menu which you would seem to want to avoid. Will have to give this some thought

@bench,

Yep that old chestnut keeps rearing it head. Basically the reason the heading and submenu gets out of sync is because the number of submenus has changed but the menu heading list has not changed to focus on the new correct position for the heading. To solve the problem when it happens head into the settings menu and then back out and everything should then be correctly synced again. Work in progress hopefully will have this particular bug nailed soon (I hope).

I think that answers everyone, jump in if I missed someone, or you have another issue you think needs addressing
Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[wyrm]

But a thing I've noticed:
Recently turned of "use currently playing video as background" or whatever that option's called, because it stuttered on the raspi, wenn scrolling through epg or files.Now when I'm in the normal channel list view and got a channel running in background, the live tv picture is jumping from the small "now playing..." at the top to the middle of the screen, somewhere around 18:48 in the following log: http://www.xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=38315
In video or music views this does not show, because the middle of the screen would always show the icon of the currently selected item, but live tv seems to work in another way. the "now playing" infotext is nice in channel list view, but one live tv picture (the bigger, the better) would be enough I think.

Bench

Sorry sport, had a look at the log file and I can't see anything there to give me a hint of what the problem is. Could you please post a picture showing the problem (hi-lite the problem area if it will make it clearer). MyPVR.xml (which is what handles the LiveTV stuff) is coded differently to the way these type of screens are coded in the rest of the skin (MyMusicNav, MyVideoNav, MyPics, MyPrograms etc), just check the context menu in this screen and then the other listed screens to see what I mean. There still lurks a number of curly ones in this part of XBMC.

I will have a bit of a poke around in this code and see what I can do, but be aware "here be monsters". The more help you can give me tracking things down, the better chance of fixing things.

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[wyrm]

The only thing missing that I've noticed is that Visualisations don't appear to work when playing audio. I checked the settings and it's enabled there but maybe I'm doing something else wrong.

doveman2,

Need some more details here. Is this everywhere or only on certain screens. Just check here on my dev machine (Win7 PC) and its working fine. If you mean it's not working on the horizontal home menu, then yes it has never worked there (tried overlaying menu items over the visualisation and playing video and it just looked wrong, so drop support for it on this screen). If the problem is everywhere, either you have got something also selected that overrides this setting (for example Artistslideshow), you will not see these screens. I think I will change the order of the settings in the skins Background settings menu to reflect the order of precedence of the background settings. Other than that you do have "Use Visuals as background" set on?

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[bench]

Wyrm,
yeah, I do realize that the live tv part is somewhat new and different to all other parts of xbmc... No offense taken (especially not from you!), if the more I dive into this, the stranger things I see.

So here is another ugly screenshot: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2ciguoi&s=5

The two live TV pictures (the big one in the middle all to the left and the small one in the top left corner) are not coexistent, they both seem to flicker every splitsecond, as if there could be only one Live TV picture and it's jumping from one position to the other. I feel a lack of words to describe this any further, sorry...

When I tried to create a shortcut to this view with a keymap entry using ActivateWindowAndFocus(PVROSDChannels), I stumbled upon yet another channellist, that somehow looks off. the currently marked border seems to small for what should fit into it, and all text looks to close together, sometimes overlapping especially at capital letters. Another ugly screenshot of this: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2eeel3n&s=5

And to make my spam complete, a debug log is available here: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2eeel3n&s=5 all screenshots were made close to the end of the log, had to keep the SAF up and let her watch something first. Don't judge me for what it is! http://www.xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=38597

Greetings, bench

PS: If I should create another topic for all the live TV stuff, then just say so. It's getting crowded here, isn't it? :p I think that's great, but to me it would make it rather hard to find the relevant infos for the bugfixing...

[wyrm]

Wyrm,
yeah, I do realize that the live tv part is somewhat new and different to all other parts of xbmc... No offense taken (especially not from you!), if the more I dive into this, the stranger things I see.

So here is another ugly screenshot: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2ciguoi&s=5

The two live TV pictures (the big one in the middle all to the left and the small one in the top left corner) are not coexistent, they both seem to flicker every splitsecond, as if there could be only one Live TV picture and it's jumping from one position to the other. I feel a lack of words to describe this any further, sorry...

OK, just checked. I think you have "Use media Overlays" setting (skin general settings menu) turned on, but things appear a little hinkey from this end, so will check this out and report back

When I tried to create a shortcut to this view with a keymap entry using ActivateWindowAndFocus(PVROSDChannels), I stumbled upon yet another channellist, that somehow looks off. the currently marked border seems to small for what should fit into it, and all text looks to close together, sometimes overlapping especially at capital letters. Another ugly screenshot of this: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2eeel3n&s=5

Not sure which dialog that is , but yes that needs some work. Go into the skins support menu and turn on "Show debug info", this will then show in blue text the windows that are open. Trigger the dialog again and post back here the name of the dialog. Should be something like DialogPVR... . Will try to fix things from there.

PS: If I should create another topic for all the live TV stuff, then just say so. It's getting crowded here, isn't it? :p I think that's great, but to me it would make it rather hard to find the relevant infos for the bugfixing...

Maybe if you are going to post many more PVR related issue it might be a good idea, but I will look after these issues in this thread.

BTW, if you check in your keymap file you will see that there is a key that will give you a screengrab (location of which you can set in the System settings menu). Try using that for screen grabs as photos of tv screens can be hard to see sometimes.

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[doveman2]

@doveman2

I'm thinking about adding Custom Addon Favourites as well, but in that case you would still need to show the Addons menu which you would seem to want to avoid. Will have to give this some thought

Would Addons menu need to be enabled though, just to show Favourite Addons under Video/Movie and Music?

Regarding the visualisations, I didn't have "Use Visuals as background" enabled Now I do and it's working fine thanks.

I think I agree with you regarding the busy spinner, without it you'd have no indication of whether XBMC had just frozen or was still working. As you say, it really needs to be fixed at the XBMC level, by making something that only updates once per second for example.

Seems to be a XBMC bug (tested with Confluence and SiO2 as well) but Weather pegs the CPU at 95%+ (only when opened, on the Home screen it's only around 65%) even though there's no animation or scrolling. I did notice the other day that some text was scrolling that didn't need to though (think it was "Chance of a thunderstorm") so you might want to see if you can expand the text box to avoid scrolling unless absolutely necessary because I know XBMC on the Pi has issues with scrolling and high CPU.

[wyrm]

@doveman2

I'm thinking about adding Custom Addon Favourites as well, but in that case you would still need to show the Addons menu which you would seem to want to avoid. Will have to give this some thought

Would Addons menu need to be enabled though, just to show Favourite Addons under Video/Movie and Music?

No there is no reason why you can't make a addon a favourite and then add it to one of these menus, other than some addons don't really seem to fit under these menu titles (the OpenElec settings addons is not really a Movie or TVShow or Music)

I think I agree with you regarding the busy spinner, without it you'd have no indication of whether XBMC had just frozen or was still working. As you say, it really needs to be fixed at the XBMC level, by making something that only updates once per second for example.

If you are willing to try something and report back, maybe we can reduce the load a little. If you go into the skin file "DialogBusy.xml" and change the animation control of the spinner image from

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="2000" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


to read

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="5400" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


and then check the system load and report back if it makes any difference maybe we can reduce the load a bit on the poor old Pi.

Seems to be a XBMC bug (tested with Confluence and SiO2 as well) but Weather pegs the CPU at 95%+ (only when opened, on the Home screen it's only around 65%) even though there's no animation or scrolling. I did notice the other day that some text was scrolling that didn't need to though (think it was "Chance of a thunderstorm") so you might want to see if you can expand the text box to avoid scrolling unless absolutely necessary because I know XBMC on the Pi has issues with scrolling and high CPU.

I will see what I can do (will see if stopping of the scrolling is possible), otherwise this is something that the XBMC devs will need to fix. Text in general is a known problem with the Devs. They are currently trying to move the Gui part of XBMC away from the Game loop model to something a bit less CPU intensive (go check some of the current work in Git for a look at some of this work). After this is done it seems text rendering may be given a serious look at. I think if you check thruout XBMC you will find instances like this all over the place. What you will probably need to do is point out these areas and make a bug report to ultimately get this fixed.

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[doveman2]

No there is no reason why you can't make a addon a favourite and then add it to one of these menus, other than some addons don't really seem to fit under these menu titles (the OpenElec settings addons is not really a Movie or TVShow or Music)

Well that's fine really as I can just enable showing addons if I need to edit the OE settings, which isn't likely to be very often

]If you are willing to try something and report back, maybe we can reduce the load a little. If you go into the skin file "DialogBusy.xml" and change the animation control of the spinner image from

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="2000" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


to read

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="5400" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


and then check the system load and report back if it makes any difference maybe we can reduce the load a bit on the poor old Pi.

Be happy to but I can't seem to install the passion repo (just reset my OE install to troubleshoot) as it says "Dependencies not met". I've got a zip of skin.xtv-saf.svn-1.3.1.841, is that the latest? I just want to make sure I'm not using an outdated version before I start testing.

I will see what I can do (will see if stopping of the scrolling is possible), otherwise this is something that the XBMC devs will need to fix. Text in general is a known problem with the Devs. They are currently trying to move the Gui part of XBMC away from the Game loop model to something a bit less CPU intensive (go check some of the current work in Git for a look at some of this work). After this is done it seems text rendering may be given a serious look at. I think if you check thruout XBMC you will find instances like this all over the place. What you will probably need to do is point out these areas and make a bug report to ultimately get this fixed.

Indeed both issues (high CPU on Weather and high CPU when scrolling) are XBMC bugs. The only reason I asked you to look and see if there's any unnecessary scrolling going on there is that they may fix the Weather bug first but the scrolling bug might take longer to fix, so if you can avoid scrolling whenever possible then it might be that you can keep the CPU down on that screen. I have no idea if/when they're likely to fix either bug though

[bench]

@wyrm,

you were absolutely right: Turning off the media overlays killed the flickering and the small image top left including the text what's playing now. But I've got to say that I somehow liked the small infos everywhere else, except for the pvr channel list and even there it was only due to the flickering. But ok, you loose some, you win some.

I did just tailed the debug log, when switching to the messy dialogue from this screenshot http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2eeel3n&s=5, it should be DialogPVRChannelsOSD.xml.

I do have a keymap intended to take screenshots, but sadly these end up being zero sized to, like the once taken via ssh...

Well I think we'll keep the current things here and if I find something else, I'll start a new topic, that way we won't have any apparently loose ends.

@doveman2,

had the same issue when trying to install the passion repo on my gotham pi. Take the download from this subsite of the passion repo: http://passion-xbmc.org/addons/?Page=Vie...tv-saf.svn and it will always be the newest version. But be patient when installing from zip. There is no gui indication, only in the log. when it's done, it will ask you, if you want to activate the new skin.

Bench

[doveman2]

Thanks bench, that's great.

I previously installed a new version of SAF whilst using the older one as the current skin and when it updated the entire skin went blank. I checked the log via SSH and could see it was installing though, so left it to it and it came back to life after a couple of mins

[wyrm]

Be happy to but I can't seem to install the passion repo (just reset my OE install to troubleshoot) as it says "Dependencies not met". I've got a zip of skin.xtv-saf.svn-1.3.1.841, is that the latest? I just want to make sure I'm not using an outdated version before I start testing.

Currently on Passion it's 1.3.3.921, but I'm hoping to have some more to upload later today, so by tomorrow morning it might be higher.

Indeed both issues (high CPU on Weather and high CPU when scrolling) are XBMC bugs. The only reason I asked you to look and see if there's any unnecessary scrolling going on there is that they may fix the Weather bug first but the scrolling bug might take longer to fix, so if you can avoid scrolling whenever possible then it might be that you can keep the CPU down on that screen. I have no idea if/when they're likely to fix either bug though

I've put a yell out on the Skin development threads to check if other have scene a problem, but there should be no scrolling text in the weather section as I turn it off by default. I think there may be a bug where scrolling is not turned off if text is center aligned, but I'm not positive on that, so don't quote me. As to there being a bug with high CPU when scrolling, NO not as such, it's basically the dirty region code is in effect being turned off by scrolling text and that is what is causing the high CPU. I think the general feeling is that rendering text in general is too hungry on CPU time and needs looking at.

It's kind of ironic that the XBox was cut loose from the main XBMC dev stream when we now have a device of around the same horsepower causing grief in the XBMC code base. BUT, remember, Rome was not built in a day and Raspberry Pi's have only been included in the XBMC party for a while. Watching Git will show you things are being worked on to improve the performance of XBMC on the low end, but things take time so be happy that it even works at all.

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

NB - OK, just discovered what is causing the issue in weather. For some reason XBMC is generating a whole pile of Dirty region events over the "Refresh" button (button id 2). If you look you will find another one of these in the main settings screen when you move from sub menus to the list items. Not sure why, but this is a XBMC problem and nothing to do with the skin.

[wyrm]

Ok everyone, just pushed a number of changes to my Googlecode page and so Passion should have a new update for you tomorrow morning (2am) Paris time.

Have slowed down the animation for the busy spinner, so the load on the system should be reduced, although I need feedback on how effective this has been.

Have made changes to how "Media overlays" works in the Live TV section, so bench if you can turn this setting back on and let me know if that is now working better that would be helpful.

Also for bench, I have made a number of changes to the "DialogPVRChannelsOSD dialog which I 'think' should have helped things a bit with the dialog you posted a picture of. As I can't see this to test it, could you post another image and give some feedback on how this went.

Wyrm (xTV-SAF)

[doveman2]

If you are willing to try something and report back, maybe we can reduce the load a little. If you go into the skin file "DialogBusy.xml" and change the animation control of the spinner image from

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="2000" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


to read

PHP Code:

<animation effect="rotate" start="360" end="0" center="auto" time="5400" loop="true" condition="true">conditional</animation> 


and then check the system load and report back if it makes any difference maybe we can reduce the load a bit on the poor old Pi.

I have tried it now but to be honest, it's hard for me to tell as I'm not currently overclocking whilst I test for stability and when it shows the busy indicator it's usually doing something that gives high CPU usage anyway, so maybe someone else who is overclocking would be better placed to tell how much difference this makes.

You might also want to try using an animated gif instead, from this post http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1468222 and instructions in this post http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1468340 to see if that works better.